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Everything I needed to Know About Politics I Learned from Facebook

Recently, I recieved an email that came as a bit of a surprise to me. Well known political blogger James Joyner from Outside the Beltway emailed me and asked if I would mind guest blogging at OTB while he attended an event in Los Angeles. I’m pretty happy about that considering James and I had a pretty rocky start but obviously our relationship has come far enough that he gave me keys to his blog.

Social Media is the wave of the future. You don’t have to be a blogger or a blog follower or even a blog agnostic to recognize that the cool kids are hanging out at places like Facebook, or MySpace. Have you heard about Twitter – the pseudo instant conversation maker that mashes up web, IM and SMS into something that has become the tool of instant conversation and marketing? Twitter is heavily used by the tech web community, a typically left-of-center political demographic, and last month took the SXSW Interactive conference by storm, tripling the number of daily users from 20k to 60k in 3 days.

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Social media is a generational thing, and the vote cannot be secured simply by speeches. Netizens probably won’t pay a lot of attention. However, Giuliani might just notice that there are over 1500 members in the Facebook group America’s Mayor, “œAmerica’s President. Giuliani 2008″³ and that there are 57K+ members plus in the “œAnti-Hillary Clinton for President “˜08″³ group.

James asked me to blog while he was gone because he felt like the areas where I write on Technosailor – the areas of technology and new media – intersect in an important way with politics. I think he’s on to something, though you might want me to go back home. Regardless, my postings over the next few days (which won’t be nearly as prolific as James’) will hopefully bring some of the discussions in my area of interest to bear in the political and cultural world to the forefront.

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I think you’re right, but it’s not just a matter of candidates moving away from “speeches” in their online communication. Another thing is that this generation is more picky about what they put their time and energy into: if a candidate’s platform doesn’t really “resonate” with us, it doesn’t matter that he’s the lesser of 2, 3 or 13 evils–we still won’t bother to actually go and vote for him.

It’s the Long Tail theory applied to politics: we’re a generation growing increasingly accustomed to being picky and choosy, and we don’t want to compromise anymore. I’d say “third parties” will be growing as more and more people in my generation grow tired of the tepid blandness of the Democratic and Republican parties.

Aaron Brazell

My name is Aaron Brazell and I am the author of the WordPress Bible. I have been building WordPress solutions for over ten years for clients large and small. I have also been a core contributor. I live in Baltimore with my dog, though I (and he) claims Austin as home.